Readings

All faces are lies—we adjust them to match the selves we want to present—but the faces of the blind show the difference between what we perceive and what is there.

As the World Cup winds down, the inquest into the Hillsborough disaster that killed 96 football supporters continues in England. Bill Buford reported on the tragedy in his 1990 classic Among the Thugs, excerpted here.

Driving 14,000 desperation-fuelled miles in 1979 gave William Least Heat-Moon the story for the essential American travelogue. Putting that story on the page gave him the best possible version of a life that had been going nowhere.

The author of The Imperfectionists and, now, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers on placelessness, the virtues of disappearing, and terrible ways to think about life.